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“Nope, absolutely not.” Even if she did subsist mainly on salads back in London, she wouldn’t here. “I didn’t think you could be a vegan in Yorkshire,” she teased. Surely it was a land of hearty stews and warming soups, not to mention thick slabs of sticky toffee pudding drowning in caramel sauce, Yorkshire puddings smothered in gravy… Her mother used to make those kinds of things, Rachel recalled, until, seemingly suddenly, she didn’t. But why did she keep thinking about her mother?
“Can I help?” she asked Harriet, who was replacing the lid of a casserole dish on top of the Rayburn.
“You could lay the table, if you wanted.” Harriet still sounded suspicious, as if she didn’t trust Rachel to do such a simple thing. What had she done, Rachel wondered as she fetched the plates, to deserve such doubt? Or maybe it was what she hadn’t done. Harriet probably had a whole list of the ways she’d disappointed her over the years.
But she wasn’t going to think that way, she reminded herself for the umpteenth time as she set the plates on the table. “How’s Dad been?” she asked. “Since I’ve been gone?” It had only been forty-eight hours, but for some reason it felt like a long time.
Harriet shrugged as she moved around the kitchen, wiping counters, checking pots. “The same, really.”
“I don’t know that I have a clear picture of what that is,” Rachel remarked in what she hoped was a friendly, inviting tone. “He’s not exactly forthcoming about his symptoms.”
“He hides them, so I don’t always know how bad it is,” Harriet replied. “But like I told you before, it’s the memory lapses. Forgetting words, putting things in odd places. And balance—he’s fallen a few times, although he acts like it’s just normal clumsiness. It isn’t. I’ve seen him tip over when he’s been standing still. There’s something wrong.” Her voice throbbed with emotion, and she strove to moderate it. “Something’s been wrong for a while. But I told you that.” Her tone was, thankfully, more matter-of-fact than accusing.
“You said months, before?” Rachel asked. She was still trying to get a handle on what was going on with her dad; every time she heard the list of his symptoms listed like that, whether it was from Ben or Harriet, she felt shaken, like someone had taken her by the shoulders and given her a good rattle. She might not have been all that close to her father, it was true, but she still loved him. He’d alwaysbeenthere—physically, if not so much emotionally; a solid, steady presence, in his own way, someone she knew she could lean on if she had to. “How many months?” she asked.
Harriet twitched her shoulders in a shrug. “I’ve been noticing for about six months, I suppose, but I think it went on before that. How long, I really couldn’t say. You pretend not to notice, don’t you?” she added, a bit bleakly. “Even to yourself.”
Yes, Rachel understood all about that. She was the queen of denying things in her own mind. “And how often is he forgetting things?” she asked. “Words, for example?”
“Well, as you know, he’s not much of a talker.” Harriet gave the casserole another stir and then replaced the lid on the pot before turning around. “So, it’s hard to say. A couple times a day, maybe?”
That much? “It must have been hard,” she said quietly, “dealing with all that.”
Harriet looked surprised by this remark, but then she shrugged again, the movement seeming dismissive. “I wasn’t really dealing with it, to be honest,” she admitted. “Not until Ben said I needed to make an appointment.”
Bendid? Rachel tried to school her expression into something that wasn’t—what?Jealousy?Heaven forbid. “You and Ben seemed to have become close,” she remarked, more of a statement than a question, doing her best to keep her voice casual, although alarmingly, she realised it took effort.
“Yeah, well, when everyone else leaves, you hang out with whoever’s left.” Rachel tensed, readying herself for a defensive reply, but then Harriet sighed. “That’s not a dig, Rachel, just a statement of fact. Izzy left too, you know. Ben and I were both alone.” Izzy was Ben’s older sister, and she’d been in Australia for years.
Rachel suddenly had a mental image of Ben and Harriet sitting around the kitchen table, sharing a bottle of wine, and lamenting about how everybody always left, how they were the only faithful ones, sticking it out, stickingtogether, the two musketeers of Mathering. The dagger-sharp pang of jealousy she felt, stabbing her right through, surprised her with its intensity and left her nearly breathless.
Ben Mackey? Really?After all this time? They’d been childhood sweethearts, yes, an intense, passionate, ridiculous relationship of just a few months. Well, sort of. At least, that’s what Rachel had told herself, with the benefit of time, age, maturity…It was first love. It never would have lasted.
Of course, she’d never actually found out.
But thinking about him now, when she had, quite deliberately, not thought about him for over a decade?
It was just because she was back home, Rachel told herself. It would pass, the same way the flu did.
“Fair enough,” she replied, laying another plate. “I just wondered.”
“Did you?” Harriet replied, eyes narrowed, and she sounded uncharacteristically shrewd. Rachel kept her head bent so her sister could not see her expression, even though she wasn’t entirely sure what that was.
Fortunately, Harriet didn’t press the point, and Rachel went to call their dad for tea. It felt both odd and familiar, to walk outside in the crisp night air, feeling her way in the dark to the barn, the door opening with a creak, the sound of shifting animals rustling in the straw a strangely comforting noise, grounding her in a reality she’d let herself forget.
“Dad?” she called into the dim space, and her father straightened from where he’d been, sitting on a stool, reading the paper. Avoiding being inside with his family, as he so often did, but at this point, frankly, she couldn’t entirely blame him.
As he came towards her, his left leg suddenly crumpled beneath him, and his expression turned childlike in its fearfulness as he flung his arms out to steady himself. Rachel sprang forward, grabbing him by the forearms to keep him upright.
“Dad!” Her voice came out in a panicked cry, and her father clutched at her for a few fraught seconds before he finally, thankfully righted himself.
“Sorry,” he said gruffly, pulling away from her with effort. “Leg must have fallen asleep.”
“Yes,” Rachel agreed shakily, although she didn’t think that’s what it had been at all. “Must have.”
Her father walked towards the house, stiff-legged and slow. “So, you’re stopping for a bit, then?” he said with a sideways glance as they came to the kitchen.
“Yes, at least until your MRI.”
